One-sided debate
June 10, 2006
Why is it that we hear again and again about the "illegal immigrants"
from south of the border but not about the "illegal employers" who
hire them?
JIM DEVINE
Torrance
Speaking of which:
In the 4,200 words that the New York Times devoted to sanctifying
its former überfuehrer Abe Ronsenthal on the occasion of his death a month
ago, the news that turned out not "fit to print" about Rosenthal wasn't his
dictatorial character, Lear-like rages, or arbitrary decisions. True, they
did skip the part about driving Bonner out of the paper for getting the
scoop on the Mozote massacre in El Salvador in 1981, but at least there's a
fair bit about his conservative politics.
What didn't make it in is that Rosenthal was an illegal, smuggled
across the border by his father, also illegal, and possibly a double
illegal, for he emigrated first from Byelorussia to Canada (where he changed
his name to Rosenthal) and then to the Bronx, after Abe was born. And maybe
he was a triple illegal for the family was Jewish and I think the Jews were
illegals in Byelorussia back then, or as close to as makes no difference.
This is what Scripps Howard News Service scribe Martin Schram
reveals about Rosenthal in an article posted on the Albuquerque Tribune web
site May 22:
"Rosenthal comes to mind every time House Republicans rail about
illegal immigrants - rounding them up and shipping them back. A Pulitzer
Prize winner who rose to become editor of The New York Times, Rosenthal once
confided to me, at a watering hole along some presidential campaign trail,
that he and his family slipped into America as illegal immigrants. His
parents left their native Byelorussia for Canada, where Abe's father became
a fur trapper and trader. Seeking a better life, the family hopped on a
train, crossed into the United States, undocumented and undetected, and
settled in the Bronx. Abe Rosenthal become a naturalized American in
adulthood."
Anyways, researching Rosenthal's past as an illegal, that was just
about the only reference I could find on Google News, that and a column by
William F. Buckley who doesn't at all deal with the details of his
immigration history, just what a swell guy good old Abe was once you got
over that supeficial axe murderer first impression.
I once traded anecdotes about editors' censorship with a former
Timesman whose name I now forget over a bottle or two of Flor de Caña. Even
after I gave him the worst I had as the Militant's correspondent in
Nicaragua, he had me beat -- hands down, day after day. And during his
tenure, the Times was Rosenthal's paper, and no one else's.
Google gave me tons of hits, on various searches like "'Abe
Rosenthal' immigrant" and "'Abe Rosenthal' illegal." But Mostly they were
blog comments like one from one "John Leo" who "has covered the social
sciences and intellectual trends for Time magazine and the New York Times."
This was Leo's concluding paragraph: "We should all be as good at
our jobs as Abe was at his. Rest in peace."
So how did it hit on my Google search? Below his brief comment were
links to his previous and next posts: "Is US giving illegal immigrants a leg
up?" denouncing the border patrol for supposedly informing the coyotes about
the activities of the minute mice and "Immigration and cheap-date
conservatives" denouncing Bush for trying to fool conservatives with this
empty gesture of a 6 kilotroop deployment from the Guard instead of sealing
the border with a couple of army corps.
Irony of ironies, the one site that DID get the skinny on Rosenthal
was vdare.com. Vdare is named for Virginia Dare, the first "English child"
--or so vdare tells us-- born in the colonies, at the "lost colony" on
Roanoke, North Carolina. Vdare is as racist and white supremacist as you
could want, with the sole distinction from the rest of such sites that it is
readable, which is no doubt due to the fact that its publisher isn't a real
American AT ALL, but rather an alien, an Englishman by the name of Peter
Brimelow.
In 2003, after she "turned," vdare republished an Abe Rosenthal "On
My Mind" column from 1995 with the poetic, symbolic title of "Arianna, Go
Home!" In 1995 Arianna was still married to what's-his-name Huffington and
the anti-immigrant Prop. 187 California Republicans. Which, be it said to
Rosenthal's credit, he never did capitulate to.
So he took her on, and in the process of doing so wrote, "Arianna,
for somebody like me, an immigrant himself," to which Brimelow added:
"[VDARE.COM NOTE: An illegal immigrant:, Rosenthal was born in Canada, and
was brought to the US during the Depression by his illegal immigrant
father.]"
There were two editorial positions of the New York Times that always
struck me as out of tune with the paper's overall editorial stance. One was
it vehement opposition to bilingualism, constantly using the example of
Quebec to make the point. The other was its opposition to immigrant-bashing.
I think I now understand them a little better.
As for skipping the inconvenient, incontrovertible, fact about your
subject that makes a story the unvarnished truth, that is pure Abe
Rosenthal.
Joaquín Bustelo
